I purchased Dreamwalker after a friend emailed me about it. He was part of my old group when I used to run a game called Shattered Dreams. If you’ve never heard of it, Shattered Dreams came out in 1994 and was produced by Apex Publications, Inc.
The reason I am mentioning Shattered Dreams is because at first glance, the two games are very similar and the term ripoff quickly comes to mind. Like this -
1. Shattered Dreams has a group of supernatural shadow creatures called the Vacyge that create nightmares and drive people insane. Dreamwalker has a group of supernatural shadow creatures called the Taenia Spiritus that create nightmares and drive people insane.
[quibble - why does everyone find it necessary now to flood their games with useless made-up names that are difficult to pronounced and remember. Why not just call them Nightmares?]
2. In Shattered Dreams you play Dreamwalkers who travel into dreams to fight these Nightmares. In Dreamwalker you play Dreamwalkers who travel into dreams to fight Nightmares.
3. Shattered Dreams has a Dreamwalker group taken over by a mad doctor. Dreamwalker has a Dreamwalker group led by a mad doctor.
Of course this is oversimplification but the obvious parallels were off putting at first. But the more I read the more I realized how different the two games were.
Shattered Dreams was a wonderful game hampered only by horrible, and I mean horrible game mechanics. I ran it for a total of six months. My players were enthused at first and we played it on every gaming night 2-3 times a week. This eventually tailed off to about once every other week and finally I was forced to shelve it against my will. The game focused on horror and insanity and the players felt the campaign was too oppressive and bleak. Each night they had to fight a different Nightmare or the Nightmares would sometimes come looking for them. It is a fun game that I still run off and on as a change up.
Dreamwalker is much larger in scope and focuses more on the actual dreams with each being its own unique adventure. The Nightmares (henceforth I will call the Taenia Spiritus "Nightmares" out of sheer stubbornness) are relegated to back story. They appear in dreams but try annoy the dreamer rather than hurt him. Characters only fight the Nightmares at the end of the dream.
After reading Dreamwalker, I expressed my approval of the game to my friend and was emailed by one of the creators a short time after who asked me to do a review for them. I explained that though I liked the game, I had some serious gripes that I would have to include and he replied saying that all he asked for was a fair review highlighting both my likes and dislikes. I agreed and will now attempt to do just that.
Appearance
The cover price lists at $24.95 US although it retails cheaper online. I don’t think I would have liked paying cover price, mainly because of the system, but I will talk more on that later.
Here are some of my first impressions upon receiving Dreamwalker. "Hmmm, the cover art is abstract and interesting"/flipflipflip/"Ooo, how did that picture get in?"/flipflipflip/"That one’s not bad, I guess"/flipflipflip/"Hey, I like that one!"/flipflipflip/"Yuck!"/flipflipflip/"Ugh!"/flipflipflip/"What crap!/flipflipflip/OK that one’s really good."
Needless to tell, I was not very impressed by the art. There were two artists. Milton and Jon Carlos. Jon is quite good and I liked his work. I can only assume that Milton is a friend or relative of the creators. Unfortunately, he did the majority of the art throughout the book and the quality ranges from average to terrible. Some of it is badly out of place like the picture of the chemical symbol and the snake biting its tail(?) which I can only assume represents the dreamwalking drug Black25. The problem is that the book doesn’t start talking about Black25 until the next chapter.
Gender
The creators apparently made no effort to change up genders and use the male pronoun throughout the book. In their defense, they do use female characters in the examples but I think they would have been better served by alternating "he" and "she" every other chapter.
Content
The book is divided into a player and GM section. The player section begins with a Kubla Khan poem and a standard introduction to role-playing and a list of game terminology. This is followed by a piece of fiction that is surprisingly good! It explains most of the game’s concepts without too much exposition and went a long way to soften me up to the game after my initial impressions.
Character generation as it stands it is very simple and should only take about a half a hour to make a character.
Here is also where we learn more about the system. I don’t understand it. I mean, I understand the game mechanics portion of it. Its simple enough and uses percentiles. Stats range from 1-100 in increments of 5 and skills range from 1-5, each one adding 5 to the stat when you attempt to do something. Roll percentiles under the combined number.
What I don’t understand is why anyone continues to use homebrew systems now that d20 (and to a lesser extent FUDGE and now Action!) is out on the market and open for use. d20 is already fully detailed and play-tested for game balanced. Every gamer should own, owns or has access to the PHB and DMG, so why the need to stand out and be different? Unless you have some quirky new and game mechanic such as tarot cards, black and white stones or even rock-paper-scissors, why waste the time, not to mention a substantial portion of the booklet, explaining a new system? In short, if your game uses dice, use d20.
The ease of using d20 is further supported by some of the game’s key elements:
1. There are four types of Dreamwalkers. A natural can dreamwalk naturally. An analyst uses the aforementioned dreamwalking drug, Black25. Mystics are spiritual or hole men that dreamwalk through meditation and prayer. Users dreamwalk by using hallucinogenic drugs like PCP. These dreamwalker types could just as easily have been turned into classes.
2. The game uses a health point system which is similar to hit points.
3. Pg.35-58 are devoted to describing the system from combat to normal tasks to injury to rules for vehicles. That’s 23 pages of a 150 page book (almost 1/6) that might have been put to better use or at least eliminated to lower retail cost.
Enough for now about the system. I will say to you that the setting itself is very fresh and while similar to Shattered Dreams, not too similar. While the descriptions and specifics are different, both games center on characters traveling through an astral-like realm that links all dreams together. I suppose similarities like this can be overlooked since both games are dealing with basically the same subject matter in the same way that AD&D and LotR uses elves, dwarves and halflings.
The characters enter the dreams and fight Nightmares trying to drive them out of people’s minds. Before they can do this they must help the dreamer complete the dream’s objective which is called a denouement in Dreamwalker. This is a very neat concept and it allows for a lot of variation since every dream setting is different and the goals can be whatever. Unfortunately, here the game once again suffers from bad syntax and unnecessary made-up words.
Take this sentence: In Dreamwalker, Dreamwalkers enter peoples dreams and help the dreamer complete the dream’s denouement.
Thankfully the writers never put a sentence like that together but the abundance of D-words that pop up over the course of the reading is sometimes confusing.
The player’s section ends with a chapter on mana. Mana is spiritual energy that may be manipulated by dreamwalkers to produce wondrous effects. Mana is really cool. The possibilities for using mana in different ways are endless. You can use mana to take multiple actions, increase damage of attacks, gain new skills (think: uploading them in The Matrix), become faster or stronger. You can also use mana to create things or reshape the dream world.
I can already see that using mana will be the focus of many games. I only hope the creators playtested the mana point system fully because mana seems to give even starting characters an amount of power I have not seen in many other games.
GM’s section
Now we come to the Game Masters section which starts by detailing how to run a clinic of Project Dreamwalker and step by step how the characters enter dreams and what they should do.
Next comes a section which describes the Nightmares. The Nightmare hierarchy is broken up into a hive like colony structure with larvae, drones and queens. I do like this. It gives it a very definite feel like the movie Aliens although for some reason the drones remind me more of the Garthim from the Dark Crystal.
A bunch of real world organizations and generic NPCs are listed next. Parts of this section were interesting but most if it seemed too vague and thrown together. They talk about a dreamwalking group run by the aforementioned mad Dr. Endell. They talk about a group with the unoriginal name of the Sword of Gaia (White Wolf anyone?). They take digs at the Vatican, suggesting the church might know something of dreamwalking but aren’t saying. And they also hint that other religions and groups have people who can dreamwalk.
Then there are several chapters on creating dreams which lists guidelines and rules for settings and denouements. This section is both good and bad. They seem to have categorized nearly every possible type of dream setting and goal as well what is to be expected during a dream. The dream settings can be surreal like a Dali painting or based in reality like normal every day. The dream goal can be an active one where the characters attack the Nightmares head on or a passive one where the characters must help the dreaming person complete some task like rescuing a princess or washing a car before they can go attack the Nightmares.
My dreams are never as coherent as these dreams seem to be though and I seldom remember trying to accomplish something in them. But maybe because I’m not a Dreamwalker.
There is a standard list of game-related movies and books. Then some adventures ideas are given as well as some rules for adapting Dreamwalker to other systems and existing campaigns. I must say that the inclusion of this almost points towards the fact that the creators knew that people would not like their system. Again, why not use d20?
The last part if the book shows a sample project clinic to begin the game with and four sample adventures. The adventures are all interesting if not epic in scope.
ADVENTURE SPOILERS - PLAYERS SCROLL DOWN
The first involves a flooded neighborhood and some zombies. I liked this adventure for the horror theme of it.
The second involves an American football game. I did not like this adventure. I do not like American football and the adventure itself did little but further showcase the gender of the creators.
The third involves an inhumane animal shelter in which the players are in for a big surprise. This was perhaps my favorite adventure of the four. I liked this one as it showed some of the oddness you could do with the game.
The fourth starts out with a space battle and ends up on a dinosaur planet. It has blatant roots in Star Wars and Jurassic park but I liked it.
SPOILERS ENDED
The book ends with an index (thank God), some charts and a few pleasant parting notes and dedications from the creators.
Overall Impressions
All in all, I liked Dreamwalker enough to give it a 3 for Substance (I would have given it a 4 if the system was different) and a 3 for Style (I would have given a 1 or 2 if not for Jon Carlos’s work).
It is an interesting little Indie game that I will probably run despite its flaws, likely after I convert it to d20 which should not take too much work. I may even design my own dream game.
The creators apparently have several supplements planned and I plan to check these out as the whole dreaming adventure thing intrigues me. I’ll be interesting to see if they stick with the game and make a second edition. If they do, I recommend that they drop Milton and get at least one more artist and convert the system to d20. This will eliminate a lot of pages but I think it will increase sales by appealing to a wider audience. Or, the page count can be boosted by including some new skills, feats and prestige classes or more adventures or more info on the setting.
In short, the game is good enough to buy though perhaps not at the cover price. If you plan to run a more horrific campaign like me, I would also recommend getting a copy of Shattered Dreams (this game is now OOP) and combining concepts of the two.
Cheers,
Tom Belczak
tbelczak@yahoo.com
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